Relationships Happily Never After Over two decades and two continents, my best friend and I learned to love each other carefully, as friends. I wish we hadn’t. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Thái An/Unsplash, Abode Stock, Diversity Studio/iStock/Getty Images Plus, and amenic181/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The message arrived the way most of our conversations always had—casual, borderless, unannounced. It was just after midnight in New York, the end of a Thursday night spent scrolling TikTok. We had been sending each other videos, the way we always did. Then, without preface, Laurence wrote: I’m getting married in June. It was noon where he was, in Hangzhou, China, where we were born. A workday. A sentence typed without ceremony. I stared at my phone long enough for it to dim, then wake again. No emoji. No exclamation point.…